We all know social media recently declared that men think nonstop about the Roman Empire. True or not as a general claim, I do spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Partly because I’m in the process of re-learning Latin. And as anyone who reads Latin primary texts can tell you, it’s either the Roman Empire or medieval European Catholicism. Given that choice, I say Imperium Romanum it is!
But if we want to talk about the Roman Empire, we need to address the question of when it fell. Because it’s not all that clear! (As an aside, it’s also a little unclear when it began, though the options there are far fewer.)